A new bill signed into Illinois law gives police a deadline to remove guns from the home of defendants in domestic violence cases.
“Karina’s bill” gives domestic violence survivors the option to request firearm removal from their alleged abuser’s home when an emergency order of protection is granted. It also revokes the defendant’s Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card.
The law is named after Karina Gonzalez, a Chicago woman fatally shot in July 2023 after reporting threatening behavior from her husband to police.
Before Monday, Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence President Carrie Boyd said a judge could check a box to have the firearms removed in order of protection paperwork. But there wasn’t a specific time frame for that to happen.
“So law enforcement now has 96 hours to remove firearms from the home or their possession of one who has an order of protection against them,” said Boyd. “That’s really what it does. It closes the gap.”
Boyd said studies show as many as 25 to 30 percent of homes where an order of protection is issued are impacted by possession of firearms. However, that’s only when firearms are reported.
“Like most instances of domestic violence or sexual assault, we know, largely go unreported, it stands to reason the possession of firearms is similar in reporting nature,” said Boyd.
Whatever the exact figure is, advocates agree firearms are not rare in domestic violence situations.
Carol Merna is the CEO for the Center for Prevention of Abuse in Peoria. Her organization provides a range of services, including helping domestic violence survivors request orders of protection.
Merna’s organization provided 10,000 shelter nights and over 2,000 orders of protection in the Tri-County area just last year.
Merna says part of the process is having a victim fill out a “lethality assessment,” one of the questions is whether an abuser has access to firearms and the answer is “often yes.”
“When somebody leaves an abusive situation, it’s those two weeks around leaving where the abuser typically feels that they’re losing power and control over that person,” she said. “That is the most dangerous time for someone involved in a domestic violence situation.”
Merna says, according to the National Center Against Domestic Violence, the presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide for women by as much as 500 percent. The organization Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence tracked a 63 percent increase in firearm-related domestic deaths in Illinois between 2019 and 2023.
Organizations like Merna’s and Boyd’s have advocated for legislation like Karina’s Bill for a long time. Boyd called it “years in the making.”
“We know that one in three women and one in four men are going to be victims of domestic violence at the hands of their intimate partner during the course of their life,” said Merna. “That’s a lot of people. So everything that we can do, whether that’s providing them crisis intervention or emergency safe shelter, helping them know that we’re here for them and that we believe them, or helping them with that tool for their order of protection that allows for firearms to be removed, the better off we’re all going to be.”
Critics of the bill have argued it takes away gun owners’ right to due process. However, the Supreme Court upheld a similar federal law last year.
“The fact that it is seen as common sense in such grand gestures as even the Supreme Court, we’re very relieved that there is this elbow room to tackle this issue,” said Merna.
